Here Comes Digital Sports Collectibles*

David Pakman
pakman.com
Published in
2 min readAug 6, 2020

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*on a blockchain!

Dapper Labs, in partnership with the NBA and the NBPA has launched the beta of their NBA TopShot crypto-collectible game. The first part of the experience allows consumers to buy packs of compelling NBA game moments. Users buy packs and try to complete various collections, build their teams and showcases, and start trading with others!

The stats from the beta are fantastic and show consumers are gobbling up these collectibles like many of us do in other collectible categories:

  • The first 900 users have bought more than $1.2M of NBA packs in the last 5 weeks (>$1300 ARPU)
  • We have sold out of 96% of available packs thus far (22,000+ packs), often times within 3 minutes of each drop (pack pricing varies from $22–$250 each)
  • 51% of payment transactions conducted with with credit card, the remaining with crypto, demonstrating some nice traction from non-crypto users

The team has done a fantastic job “hiding” the complexities of wallets, crypto tokens, blockchains and account security. To users, this feels like a simple ecommerce or in-app purchase experience. After a pack purchase, the user watches an exciting unveil of their Moments:

My collection is pretty weak so far, but my son has collected some great ones:

Surprisingly to many, this entire experience is a decentralized app built atop a layer one smart-contracts blockchain called Flow. Flow was designed and built by Dapper to handle mainstream and highly-scaleable games and other consumer experiences. Each moment you buy or trade is actually a non-fungible cryptotoken (NFT) sitting atop a smart contract. This enables true ownership in perpetuity, verifiable provenance, and allows other developers to build games in which your moments can be used.

The experience opens to the public (and the other 13,000+ people on the waiting list) sometime this fall, but, in the meantime, you can sign up here to jump the line.

In addition, Dapper is announcing the completion of an additional $12M financing to help scale Flow and TopShot, with participation by some notable NBA players like Andre Iguodala, Spencer Dinwiddie, Aaron Gordon, Javale McGee.

Back in November, 2018, I detailed our investment thesis in crypto collectibles and why I thought they might usher in a wave of consumer blockchain usage. We are about to see whether this view is right or not, but the early data looks super-promising…

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I invest in crypto @coinfund_io. Investor in Dollar Shave Club, Dapper Labs, Rarible, Flow and more. Previously @Venrock.